Every day, we receive support tickets, and one of the things we note is what version of the operating system our users are running. Often an out-of-date operating system causes many of those issues, including problems with our applications. To avoid that, Apple offers several options for easily keeping your operating systems up-to-date and running well.

On your Mac, go into System Settings > General > Software Update. Click the info button ⓘ to the right of Automatic Updates to see the available options.

Enable Download new updates when available. We suggest you enable Install macOS updates, especially if you don’t check for updates regularly. OS updates are generally done overnight when your Mac is plugged in and will restart the machine. Major releases, such as macOS Tahoe to Golden Gate, are not installed automatically and must always be installed manually. And to keep things like malware definitions and security patches up to date, you should also enable Install system data files and security updates.

In iOS and iPadOS, you’ll also find automatic update options in Settings > General > Software Update > Automatic Updates. If you have the option OS Updates: Automatically Install enabled, the other options are automatically enabled as well and hidden.

And finally…

• We do not recommend immediately moving to the first version of a major release of an operating system. You should wait for at least the .1 release.
• Unless you’re required to do so for work, we do not recommend running a beta operating system, neither on Mac nor or mobile. So if you have Beta updates available as an option, it should be set to Off.

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Yesterday, a rather serious web server vulnerability known as PHP2Shell was made public. As it affects the majority of websites worldwide, many data centers took the precaution of shutting down services, installing security updates, or activating protective shields.

We’re pleased to report that most of our services are now back online.

At the time of writing (October 22, 2026, 11:45 UTC), I’m afraid the integrated welcome, support, and help assistants are still sheltering behind a safety shield, and we’re awaiting word from the brave admins currently toiling away in the data center. Unfortunately, it also appears that any emails sent to our sales and technical support teams between 17:00 yesterday and 09:00 UTC today have very likely been lost for good. If you tried to get in touch during that time and didn’t receive an automatic confirmation that your message had reached our support ticket system, we’d be most grateful if you could kindly send your question or feedback again.

Update (October 24, 2026, 19:58 UTC): Our data center has lowered the somewhat too protective safety shield from our services and so the integrated assistants are working again.

Many thanks for your patience and understanding.

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To make DEVONthink easier to use, we maintain a detailed user handbook, which is available in the app as Help. But we also offer a Help assistant, which is a chat interface to ask questions about DEVONthink. The chat is powered by an external AI language model that has access to full documentation. And since DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho, the Help assistant is available free of charge in all editions.

Select Help > DEVONthink Help to open the Help viewer. At the upper right corner is a sidebar icon that opens the Help assistant. Just ask the assistant any question about the app, and you’ll receive an answer including a link to the relevant passage in the Help that you can click. However, the assistant only answers questions regarding DEVONthink’s documentation and isn’t an alternative to the chat inspector in DEVONthink. If you want to integrate an external AI in DEVONthink, you need the Pro or Server edition and an API key.

What makes the Help assistant especially handy: if your English is limited, ask questions in your native language. Imagine you’re wondering what a “Bonjour sync” is, but you’re German. Open the Help assistant and ask, “Was ist ein Bonjour-Sync?” It gives you a useful reply in German. You can click the link to the appropriate chapter and ask the assistant for a translated summary or details of the page.

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Why are researchers turning to AI models that run locally on their own computers rather than on remote servers? What can these models already do, for example when searching the literature? And where do they reach their limits?

David Brzostowicki took a closer look at these questions for the scientific journal Nature. Privacy, reproducibility, and cost were the reasons he kept hearing. While researching his article, David also talked to Eric, our president and the developer of DEVONthink To Go. After all, many of our customers use DEVONthink to work with important or sensitive documents: medical records, legal files, or their own research results. Data like this often shouldn’t, or legally can’t, end up on someone else’s servers, let alone be used to train LLMs. That’s why DEVONthink supports not only server-based AI models but also local ones, for example through LM Studio or Ollama.

David’s article, “How to Search the Literature with Local AI Systems,” appears in the current issue of Nature (vol. 658, pp. 830–831) and is also available online. To read the full text, you’ll need a Nature account or access through your institution.

And yes, we’re a little proud to have made it into Nature. Wouldn’t you be?

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DEVONthink has a powerful search that offers extensive search options for narrowing down results precisely. If you’re running the Pro or Server edition and have AI set up, the AI-powered Search Assistant makes them easier to use. It translates a search query in natural language into DEVONthink’s search syntax, so you can create a fine-tuned search more conveniently.

To use it, first make sure you have an AI model selected. You don’t need to use the highest-tier model, but a mid-tier model like Claude Sonnet can be more accurate than smaller ones (Apple’s Foundation Models are too limited for this purpose). Put your cursor in the toolbar search field and press the Return key. The Scope bar and search options appear beneath it. Now click the AI button to open the Search Assistant.

In the top field, describe what you want to find. For example, type PDF documents with more than 125 pages and press Return. You will see the suggested syntax, e.g., kind:pdf length>125, below your description. Press the chasing arrow button to retry the conversion, the clipboard button to copy the search syntax, or press Search to run that search. You can also try searches with custom metadata, e.g., PDFs from journal:NEJM could yield kind:pdf mdjournal:NEJM.

Be aware that the AI only converts your query into DEVONthink’s search syntax; it’s not searching itself. So telling it to search for documents supporting investment in utilities will produce something like kind:any “investing in utilities”. The AI will not read, assess, and gather PDFs. However, if you say PDFs needing OCR, the AI should give you a usable search. Keep in mind that the AI will give you only one approach. Beyond retrying the conversion, you can run the search then fine-tune it.

And yes, if you have AI set up in DEVONthink To Go, tap ⋯ > Search Assistant in the search field to use the Search Assistant there too.

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DEVONagent Pro finally supports dark mode. Its toolbar now uses SF Symbols with a more refined layout, and we have modernized the search windows, progress indicators, buttons, and the Download Manager throughout the interface. The built-in browser gets better along with Cloudflare-protected sites, and DEVONagent Pro respects a site’s robots.txt even if it lists several user agents in one group. With this release we have also retired the Express and Lite editions and removed support for the dusty Automator.

DEVONsphere Express gets a subtle cosmetic update, including new SF Symbols icons in the Preferences toolbar. It also parses dates more reliably when indexing PDF documents.

You can find a complete list of all improvements by choosing Help > Release Notes inside each application. We recommend these updates to all users of DEVONagent Pro and DEVONsphere Express. Get them by using the applications’ update function or from our Download page. If you downloaded DEVONagent Pro from the App Store, update it from the App Store app.

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We sometimes receive questions about one-way syncing, similar to how backup applications work. But synchronization is not a backup and DEVONthink's sync is not a one-way process. DEVONthink uses a two-way or bi-directional sync, which means, it keeps the databases on each syncing device in the same state, so each device “mirrors” the others. This concept is also foundational to cloud services, so it’s worth understanding.

The modifications in a database that synchronize between our applications include: adding, removing, grouping and ungrouping, changing metadata like tags, content changes in documents, etc. Some other properties that are synced depend on your sync location settings, which you can find in Settings > Sync > Locations > Show location info. These may include label colors and names, reading positions in PDF documents, and custom metadata changes relevant to Pro and Server users of our desktop application.

Bi-directionality means, that modifications to a database on one device affect the copy of the same database on the other syncing devices. This also means there is no defined “master” database, even if you work primarily on one device. Every device has the authority to sync its changes to the other devices. In a collaborative setting, it’s even more important to understand this.

Imagine you usually work with your database on a Mac Studio. While you’re out, you delete a group in the database on your iPhone. You effectively just deleted that group from the database on your other devices, because that will happen when they sync. If you are using a remote sync option, like Dropbox, you have remotely deleted that group and may not find that out until you get back home.

Earlier this year, we wrote A Sync Checklist for DEVONthink that you may also want to have a look at. Also, if you work in a team environment and could use more granular control over who can change what, the web interface provided by DEVONthink Server might be an option.

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Joe Kissel from Take Control Books has published the fifth quaterly update for his ebook Take Control of DEVONthink 4. It is now up to date with DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho and DEVONthink To Go 4.2.2 Chandra. Joe covers improvements to our external AI features, new scripts for MailMaven, and DEVONthink To Go’s Zen Mode. He has also replaced some screenshots and updated them for macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Download Take Control of DEVONthink 4 for free from our Handbooks and Extras page or directly from Take Control Books.

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DEVONthink 4.4.1 lets you create and edit tables directly in the Markdown WYSIWYG editor, and numbered lists now renumber automatically. A completely rewritten Word export of Markdown documents faithfully preserves styles, citations, and MathJax formulas. Web clipping and the Reader view now use publisher-provided Markdown streams, keeping subtitles, image captions, and rich metadata intact across capture formats.

For Pro and Server users, the Apple Mail integration lists messages up to 30 times faster and loads the mailbox hierarchy in the background. The AI toolset gains the new Chronology skill, support for OpenAI’s GPT 6 Astra, Sol, and Luna as well as GPT-Image-2.5, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Sonnet 5.5. It can now also use remote Gemini transcription and integrates with Tavily and Brave for search.

The Server edition now downloads complete groups from the web interface, powered by an asynchronous engine with virtually no memory overhead, even for multi-gigabyte transfers. Compatibility updates for macOS 26 Tahoe and macOS 27 Golden Gate, plus many reliability and performance improvements, round out the release.

You can find a complete list of all improvements by choosing Help > Release Notes inside the application. We recommend this update to all users of DEVONthink for Mac. Get it by using the application’s update function or from our Download page. The New & Improved page also highlights what’s new in each feature release.

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With the Pro or Server edition of DEVONthink, you can  archive and organize your emails in your databases. Fortunately, emails have certain identifying attributes you can use for finding, organizing, or acting on those documents.

These email attributes aren’t interchangeable, so it’s worth being clear about their distinction.

• Author: the name of who is sending the email.
• From: The sender’s email address.
• Recipient: the name of who receives the email.
• To: The recipient’s email address.
• Subject: The subject line of the email.

If you use tags for your organizing, enable DEVONthink’s Settings > Files > Tags > Convert properties to tags. Imported emails will be tagged with all the properties available on the email, except the subject. You can now view emails in the tags of your database. Also, these tags can be used on any other items in your database, e.g., tagging a project or an invoice with specific vendor or peoples’ names.

While tags can still be used, another approach is creating smart groups (or smart rules), with criteria matching on those fields. For a broad match, add criteria Kind is Email and Recipient is Darth Vader. If the person has multiple email addresses, you can instead use To is skyw_anakin@empire.gov. Or get even more specific by including a subject, e.g., Subject is Sink dripping in Detention Block AA-23, sub-level five, Cell 2187.

You can also create a smart group to match certain email attributes and then run different commands on them, including filing, labeling, assessing via external AI, etc. Or even create a smart rule and use an event trigger like On Import, to process your emails automatically.

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It’s the season for Apple’s new mobile hardware, with tech channels abuzz. But you might not be ready to part with your older device just yet. If you have old hardware that can’t run iOS 26 or later, and you need to (re)install DEVONthink To Go 3, here’s how you can do it.

First things first: we do not control the App Store and all mobile downloads must be done there. Also, as DEVONthink To Go 3 is no longer for sale, you need to have downloaded or purchased it at some point in the past. The following procedure is based on Apple’s requirements and we can’t guarantee it will work in the future. That being said, here are the steps:

1. Open the App Store application.
2. Tap your avatar (the encircled image) at the upper right and choose Apps & Purchase History.
3. Tap Your Apps.
4. Search for devon.
5. Tap the download button to the right of the app’s name to reinstall it.
6. Leave the App Store and launch DEVONthink To Go.

Lastly (and importantly): DEVONthink To Go 3 is now retired from development. While our support team can answer questions about it, we will no longer update the app itself unless there are security issues that we need to address. The current version is DEVONthink To Go 4.2.2 and is available as a separate app in the App Store.

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If you are running the Pro or Server editions of DEVONthink, you may have noticed it has a folder in iCloud Drive. It’s nothing to worry about, nor is it doing anything invasive.

The higher editions of DEVONthink have optional AI features. Among these features are roles, prompts, and skills, which you can use to specify workflows and fine-tune the AI’s behavior. Found in the ​Settings > AI > Library​, these roles, prompts, and skills can be synced to other Macs via iCloud Drive, enabled by default. These skills can also run scripts to further augment their capabilities. DEVONthink stores and syncs those supplemental files as well.

If you’d like to disable this option, go into the ​System Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Saved to iCloud​ and click the ​See All ​button.​ If ​iCloud Drive​ is set to ​On​, click it, then open the ​Apps syncing to iCloud Drive​ list. If DEVONthink is enabled here, the prompts, roles, and skills in your AI > Library will sync to your other machines. Disable this at your discretion.

One more thing to note: you may have scrolled down in the Saved to iCloud > See All list and noticed a separate entry for DEVONthink. This option only relates to synchronization. When enabled, it allows all editions of DEVONthink to do an iCloud sync, i.e., via the CloudKit or Legacy sync locations.

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You may have seen concerning messages about applications, including some of ours, that won’t work on future macOS versions. But is that a cause for concern, especially for our freeware apps?

Apple’s deprecation of their Rosetta framework and Intel Macs is specifically about Intel-based hardware and software. Our applications are universal, so they run on both Intel processors and Apple silicon. Therefore, this has no effect on our freeware. Just make sure your apps are up to date, or download them again if needed. The one exception is ThumbsUp, which is currently still an Intel-only app.

To check whether an app is still Intel-based, select it in the Finder, then press ⌘I to open the Get Info pane. In the General section, look at the Kind field. If it reads Application (Apple silicon), that’s perfect. If it says Application (Universal), it should also continue to run on future versions of macOS. Only if it says Application (Intel), you will need to find a newer Apple silicon version, an alternative application, or not upgrade the operating system.

If you want a more detailed list to check all your apps, hold the option key (⌥), click the Apple menu at the upper left of your screen, and choose System Information. Select the Software > Applications section to see your installed applications. In the application list, click the Kind column to sort it, and you can see what native Apple silicon, Universal, or Intel applications you have installed.

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The semester’s back, and so is that particular kind of chaos. New notebooks, forgotten passwords, syllabi that already feel three weeks behind.

Whether you’re a student drowning in PDFs, an educator rebuilding a course from scratch, or a researcher chasing down one elusive citation — the real challenge isn’t learning and researching. It’s keeping track of everything you learn. Notes scattered across apps, papers buried in your downloads folder, half-finished thoughts you swore you’d remember.

This is where a little structure goes a long way. DEVONthink and DEVONthink To Go turn that scattered mess into something you can actually navigate. New term, same tools, better odds of staying on top of it all.

Now is the best time of the year to get prepared for the new school or campus year. Students and educators, get our Mac apps at an exclusive 40 percent discount until September 20th, 2026. You’ll receive the same discount on extensions for your DEVONthink license, too, and the Pro and Server editions of DEVONthink also unlock DEVONthink To Go for iPad and iPhone as long as the license receives updates.

To get the discount, log into your customer account and check if you still have a valid education status. If not, reapply from there. And if you haven’t bought any products from us yet, click the following button to create an account. The discount will be applied automatically as long as you are logged in with an account with a valid education status.

We all spend a lot of time on the Internet and clip content into our DEVONthink databases regularly. But web clipping is not trivial, especially as technologies change. In DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho, we made this a lot better.

Working from the Source

Our clipping now works directly with the loaded web content, giving you more accurate clippings. You should also notice that the captures are faster than before, and the Preview button shows an improved representation of the clipped output, with compatible formats.

Sharing Cookies & Capturing Locally

If you have a bookmark to an authenticated or paywalled site in your database, DEVONthink stores cookies for that site when you log into it. It then passes those cookies to our clipping process, increasing the chances of successful captures from such sites instead of giving you clippings of their login pages.

Previously, when using the clutter-free option when clipping in a browser, it sent a URL to our server that extracted the article. While this worked well enough for many years, our new Markdownifier works directly on your machine, making the round trip unnecessary and the whole process much faster and more private.

Reader View

In addition to improved capture options, DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho brings a new Reader view that lets you view web articles clutter-free. Open it by clicking the page icon in the web view’s navigation bar, selecting View > Document Display > Reader, or pressing ⌃⌘A. A clean view of the article opens in the view/edit pane, similar to what you see in Safari. Capture the contents of the Reader view via the Action (gear icon) menu in the navigation bar, the Tools > Capture menu command, or Clip To DEVONthink.

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The Chat assistant itself got smarter too. With MCP tools enabled, the chat assistant is not limited to the selected items anymore but has access to all your databases (if not excluded from MCP) and most tools of the stand-alone MCP server. Multi-step conversations like these are also noticeably faster and much cheaper now, thanks to improved prompt caching. And, of course, we’ve updated to the latest models from all major AI providers, so whichever one you prefer, you’re chatting with its newest version.

Markdown takes the second spotlight this release. The WYSIWYG editor supports live-edited tables and MathJax equations, not just images and links, and a new syntax colorizer with custom color themes makes source and rendered output easier on the eyes. If you write in LaTeX (or wish you could) you can now export Markdown documents straight to native LaTeX, or typeset them as PDF via pdflatex, resolving WikiLinks and transclusions and carrying your title, author, and date metadata along the way.

Web clipping got a matching upgrade: a new, local Markdownifier and Readability engine make it faster and more accurate, with better handling of navigation, ads, boilerplate, paywalls, and user forums. And when you just want to read something without the clutter, the new Reader view gives you a clean, distraction-free look at bookmarks, HTML documents, and web archives. Open it from the navigation bar, then capture straight from it via Tools > Capture or by printing.

Finally, encrypted and revision-proof databases now use modern APFS disk images on macOS 26.0 Tahoe and later, replacing the older HFS+ format, and the Help viewer’s chat assistant is free in every edition, so anyone can ask it a question while reading the manual.

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An application’s icon is typically considered as just something to click on to launch it. However, many developers add information and commands to the context menu of an app’s Dock icon, and DEVONthink is no exception. Control-click its Dock icon to reveal a useful context menu with these sections/commands:

• Recently opened databases: Quickly reopen databases. The number of databases shown is governed by the number of items specified in System Settings > Menu Bar > Recent documents, applications, and servers.
• Open windows: View, restore, or switch to your open windows. Main windows display as database name — selected item. Document windows show their title. Minimized windows have an unfilled diamond indicator. PDF documents report the number of pages, page size, and magnification; images display pixel dimensions, resolution, and magnification.
• New Window: Open a new window for a database chosen in the submenu listing all your open databases.
• Take Note: Opens the Take Note view of the Sorter to create or continue working on a note.
• Start/Stop Server: For those using the Server edition, lets you easily start and stop the websharing component.

Below these app-specific commands, you’ll find standard macOS options, such as keeping the icon pinned to the Dock, assigning DEVONthink to a specific desktop space, or quitting the app.

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One of those topics we often talk about in support and on our forums is being diligent about backups. At a minimum, an external hard drive and Time Machine are much better than no backups. But for a more robust backup strategy, think: 3-2-1. The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a good way to minimize data loss. Simply stated: keep three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy stored offsite. Here’s a quick overview, with your DEVONthink databases as the example.

Three copies of your data: One copy is the database you’re working on. The second copy is on your primary backup. We advocate a local backup using an external hard drive and Time Machine or a similar snapshot-style backup application. This gives you immediate access to your backups in an emergency. The third copy is a redundant backup.

Backed up to two separated media: Your two backups should be stored on different media, ideally on a different type of media. So, if your primary backup is on an external hard drive, the second backup could be a network-attached storage (NAS) or an online backup via an appropriate backup application, e.g., Arq. But of course, a second external drive is better than no redundant backup.

With one offsite copy: An offsite copy is a safety measure in case of extreme circumstances. Fire, theft, floods, weather, etc. can affect a single geographic location, leaving you in a situation where your local backups, including redundant ones, could be lost. Many people still store backup hard drives in a separate physical location like a safety deposit box in a bank. Sounds old-fashioned, but that can come in handy if the worst happens. If your third copy is online, that counts as an offsite backup.

We hope this encourages you to stop and take a look at your data safety and start or resume your backups today!

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We previously wrote about replacing text in documents in DEVONthink, which is mainly useful within single documents. Handling items one-by-one works fine for small batches, but it quickly becomes slower and more error-prone as your volume grows. However, you can easily change certain texts in multiple items using a batch process. To do that:

1. Select some items you want to rename.
2. Now select Tools > Batch Process > Batch Process and press the plus button (+) to start a new configuration.
3. Choose the Find & Replace action.
4. Select Name, click Edit, and enter the text to change and its replacement. For example, replace devonthink with DEVONthink. Enable Case Insensitive if you want all capitalizations to be changed.
5. Click the Apply button and the name is changed.

The action works on names, URLs, item aliases, and Finder comments. This feature is used very often, for example, to rename multiple documents at once. Or, if you’re using the Pro or Server edition, it works on custom metadata attributes too. Imagine you have an attribute for your creditors. Early on you entered BestBuy and later changed it. To clean things up, select the documents and choose the attribute, e.g., Creditor, and define the replacement: BestBuy becomes Best Buy. When you apply it, that metadata will change for all the selected documents. Documents already using Best Buy remain untouched since they don’t match the criteria.

Logically, if you have different repeated replacements, you can create a new configuration for each one. And if this is a replacement you do often, you can quickly access it via the Tools > Batch Process menu or via the context menu in the item list. It’s also possible to assign a hotkey to make running it even quicker!

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When creating automations in DEVONthink, the processes are defined in simple, unvarying step-by-step instructions. The Pro and Server editions have an additional specialized smart action called Chat – Continue if that uses external AI to determine if a process should continue.

Available in smart rules and batch processing, this action can assess some input, optionally including a document. You define a question to a chat model that can be answered either positively or negatively. If the answer is positive, subsequent actions are executed; if the answer is negative, they are not. You can also use placeholders in your query by clicking the three-dot icon on the right side of the input field.

You can ask straightforward fact-checking questions, for example, Is this document an invoice? Or ask more qualitative, reasoning-based questions like, Does this document present important information in a way a layperson can easily understand? As a practical example, you could construct a prompt to check if a document is from a list of known vendors: Is this a receipt from one of these vendors: Apple, Guitar Center, Target, … As subsequent actions, you define what should happen if the answer is positive.

Two important things to remember:

• Phrase your prompt to elicit a binary “yes/no”, “true/false” answer. A prompt like Is this document about astronomy or astronauts? is not an appropriate inquiry. However, adding Reply ONLY with yes or no can help focus things.
• A smart rule or batch process continues only when the action returns a positive result. If the smart action returns a negative result, the smart rule or batch process will not continue. Imagine parsing RSS articles: if you prompt with Is this article about AI? then use a subsequent action with Is this article about macOS?, the article must first be positively detected as being about AI in order to assess if it’s also about macOS.

Remember AI isn’t infallible (as you’ve surely noticed before) and its qualitative assessment may be “more yes than no” but not definitively “yes”. For these types of prompts, you can also include a phrase like Answer no if you aren't confident.

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